08 December 2009

First Winter Storm, First Winter Problems

I've been slacking on the post front which I really apologize for. I'm hoping to put some past stories that take place from the past few months up but in the mean time I'll start with today's actions.

Saturday the Washington DC area experienced it's first winter storm for the season. We received about 4-6 inches of snow that reduced the area into a state of mild pandemonium. Grocery stores were packed. There were motor vehicle accidents everywhere. You would have thought the apocalypse was coming. Sadly, this is fairly typical for the metro area when we get any type of storm with the word "winter" in it. My Saturday morning was spent waking up at a friend's apartment still drunk from the night before. I managed to slalom amongst the timid crowding the roads from Arlington back to Great Falls to sleep in an actual bed versus a couch. My day was fairly uneventful. I had been looking forward to an ice skating date with a friend later that night so I just lazed around the house wasting time until night fall. About an hour before I left, my mother cried out to me, "Did you hear something fall?" I had heard nothing. Then again, I was playing music pretty loudly and had barely heard her. My friend who had been walking with his wife by our pipe stem came, knocked on our door, and informed us of the source of the noise: A 20 meter tree with a diameter of almost a meter fell over in our yard barely missing our house. I cut up some branches so our neighbor could in fact get out of their driveway, took a shower, and went out with my friend.

My friend and I came back to my place with a bottle of wine and watched TV till we eventually passed out (from skating and not necessarily wine that is...). When I woke up it and left the house to take her back, it dawned on me a) how much of a task it was going to be to get rid of the tree and b) how lucky we were that it didn't fall 90 degrees to the right into the house. I had no luck Sunday trying to find a chain saw so I lazed around again till Monday. We used the phrase "Saw shape" to describe how in shape one was to run a chainsaw for hours on end in a fire. Saw shape I was not in. The tree was hemmed up in several different trees in our yard. I spent most of my time cutting away brances of smaller bushes and trees just to get to the tree that actually fell so I can see how to get that one down. I left my house after hours of cutting bushes and broken branches to get more fuel and contemplate as to how long it would take me to finish falling this tree. While I was out I decided to get some fuel and something to eat.



From Home - D.C




From Home - D.C




From Home - D.C





I went to a Sunoco at the intersection of Leesburg Pike and Baron Cameron Ave in Herndon/Great Falls, VA. I started the pump and went inside to get a gatorade and something to eat. I looked like shit. I was wearing dirty oil covered overalls, and a black flees with sawdust all over it. I was walking out and to my car when a woman that had just pulled up in a Lexus put her credit card in my hand and told me to, "fill it up with regular and make sure you do a good job on my windshield when you wipe it this time!" A wave of anger overcame me stemming from working in my yard for hours on end. My mouth loosened to say something vulgar but I hesitated. Instead, I smiled, said, "Yes ma'am", stuck her card into the pump, stuck the Diesel nozzle into her tank on full blast, and gave her card back (she never even looked me in the eye while she was talking on her cell phone). I got in my car and left.

At this point I was pretty upset with the way the day was going. I finished for the day around 1730. There was shit everywhere. You could smell pine for hundreds of yards. Our yard was covered with sawdust, pine needles, mud, and bucked up logs. There's still 25 feet of tree hung up in another tree that I have to take care of tomorrow. But, our house is standing and we're alive, thank God. Hopefully the rest of the storms throughout the winter don't bring any other problems to our home.